I
always feel a certain dread when I have to return to Wisconsin after a break in
Canada. It’s not about the teaching
(usually), but rather my sense that some further horrible decision will be made
by the state government that will make life there even more unnecessarily
unpleasant than it already is.
A New York Times piece from a week ago,
“The Destruction of Progressive Wisconsin” by Dan Kaufman, does a good job in
summarizing the transformation of Wisconsin over the past five years under
Governor Scott Walker and his henchmen within the Republican-controlled state
legislature; the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) also
is discussed. (ALEC is one of my bêtes noires.)
Individual
freedom is a central concern of mine, both politically and in my philosophical
work. So I find it fascinating, and at
the same time deeply depressing, to see the ways in which pro-plutocracy
organizations like ALEC, and the politicians that implement ALEC’s ‘model
legislation,’ deploy the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ to justify their policies. So-called ‘right-to-work’ laws are a perfect
example of this: such laws, of course, do not ensure anything like a ‘right to
work.’ Moreover, they do not remove a
restriction on employment. People always
are free to accept or decline a job at a unionized firm. Nobody is every ‘forced’ to join a
union. What ‘right-to-work’ laws do is restrict freedom of contract, encourage
freeriding, and coercively (through the force of law) undermine the viability
unions. It’s an Orwellian term.
Having
smashed the unions of Wisconsin – and thereby undermined the freedom of workers
there – Walker and his minions have turned their sights on the state’s civil
service. Kaufman explains:
By adding the Civil Service bill [to previous ‘right-to-work’ legislation], Mr. Walker brings Wisconsin closer to the achievement of a long-sought goal of the libertarian right: universal “at-will employment.” Unlike union workers or state employees, whose collective bargaining agreements or Civil Service rules generally require employers to demonstrate “just cause” for them to be fired, at-will employees can be terminated at any time for any reason. At-will employment is promoted by the Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council, which disseminates model bills to state legislators benefiting its corporate members and conservative private backers.
The
‘libertarian right,’ of course, interprets a law that permits ‘at-will
employment’ as one that is ‘freedom enhancing’ in nature. And at-will employment does increase freedom
– but only the freedom of those individuals who already enjoy considerable
wealth and power, namely, employers. It
increases their freedom to dominate
others, by entitling employers to fire arbitrarily – and thus to threaten more
generally – their employees. The
flipside of this kind of freedom for the powerful, of course, is unfreedom or subjugation for
employees. Employees are rendered even
more vulnerable to the will of their employers under an ‘at-will employment’
regime.
The
less that employees are subject to arbitrary firing – and subject to ongoing
threats of arbitrary firing – the more they enjoy what some political
philosophers who write on liberty call ‘freedom as non-domination’ or
‘republican liberty.’ (The reference to
‘republican liberty’ by political philosophers such as Philip Pettit, it should
be stressed, refers to the Roman
Republic, where a freeman enjoyed a certain status under the law, and obviously
is not a reference to the contemporary American Republican Party, which
generally opposes republican freedom
for most citizens.) In contrast, the
more that employees are subject to arbitrary firing – and thus subject to
ongoing threats of arbitrary firing – the more they are subject to domination,
and thus the more they are unfree.
So while
the libertarian right, and the contemporary Republican Party more generally,
portrays itself as championing individual freedom through such policies, it in
fact is championing only the freedom of the already powerful, whilst further
restricting and undermining the freedom of most citizens.
Professors
such as myself hardly have been exempt from the Republicans’ assault on liberty
within Wisconsin. After all, the recent
attack on tenure is precisely about undermining academic freedom and rendering
academics more vulnerable to the will of the politically powerful.
Sadly, the dark days in Wisconsin do not look to be ending any time soon…
Sadly, the dark days in Wisconsin do not look to be ending any time soon…
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